technicalities

October 03, 2010

We interrupt our (de facto, impromptu, and strictly temporary, I assure you) hiatus to pass on the announcement of a film screening this week: Radio Free Albemuth, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, has its New York premiere this Thursday, October 7th, as part of the Gotham Screen International Film Festival. The novel on which the film is based, originally entitled Valisystem A, was Philip K. Dick's first attempt to communicate his religious experiences into fictional form. Legend has it that the publisher requested fairly minor revisions when he turned in the draft, but he instead completely rewrote the thing, producing Valis. When the Valisystem A draft was found in his papers after his death, it was considered different enough from its descendant to deserve publication under its own cover (and new, disambiguating title). I'm certainly a fan of Valis, but I've always considered Radio Free Albemuth to be at least as good, and in some ways even better. Writer/producer/director John Alan Simon has maintained a healthy level of contact with the PKD community throughout the development of the film, which bodes well for the finished product. I am certainly looking forward to the screening (and, no doubt, pestering Simon with questions about his take on the Exegesis afterward).

August 20, 2010

Cornell University's incoming freshmen are lucky: their summer reading assignment for this year is Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Cornell's Carl A. Kroch Library invited me to curate an exhibit on the novel's bibliographic history and broad influence (including its slightly more famous stepchild, Blade Runner). The exhibit is now open and runs through October 8th, but don't worry if you're not planning a trip to Ithaca in the next few weeks-- an online version of the exhibit is available on Cornell's website. I had always enjoyed Androids, but I gained a new level of appreciation for it in researching this exhibit (which is my first official curatorial credit, hurrah).

From my introductory essay:

Dick once described himself as “a fictionalizing philosopher, not a
novelist.” He saw his works as explorations of two primary questions:
“What is reality?” and “What is human?” Androids enthusiastically
tackles the second question, skillfully fusing its ideas about cruelty
and empathy into a compelling detective story. Other works in his oeuvre
explore the question as thoroughly--for instance, the novel We Can
Build You and the speech “The Android and the Human.” But none do
so in so entertaining a fashion as Androids.

This is turning out to be a very busy PKD year for me: in addition to this exhibition, I've read (and will shortly be reviewing, for the SFRA Review) the long-awaited final volume of the Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick. And, most importantly and excitingly, I've joined the team of scholars that is assembling a new, two-volume selection of previously-unpublished theological material from Dick's Exegesis (previously mentioned, prior to my involvement, here). They've got a great group working on this project, and they're doing the job exactly how it should be done. There is absolutely brilliant stuff in there that will soon see the light of day for the first time... and needless to say, I'm pretty thoroughly thrilled. More on that as publicity and propriety allow. In the meantime, check out the exhibit!

June 01, 2010

This novel, one of Clarke's last (though I think it's safe to assume that Baxter did most of the actual writing), explores the cultural and psychological impact of visual wormhole technology that allows viewers to see what's going on anywhere on Earth... and, eventually, anywhere in the universe, at any time. This is an idea that comes up, briefly, in Clarke's masterpiece, Childhood's End, where the alien Overlords introduce similar technology to humankind, and in the space of a page or two it allows the human race to cast of its myths and illusions and live more fully in the present. That's not quite what happens here-- there is a bit of myth-debunking (on which more below), but for many people the ability to witness the past leads to a morbid obsession with what has gone before. And the elimination of the very concept of "privacy" creates a far more wide-reaching generation/technology gap than Facebook or the iPod ever could.

Religion crops up concretely in a few places in the novel. Early on (before the WormCam is developed) there's an enterprising, technophilic evangelist who uses VR to turn his worship services into grand spectacles. He's a stock character, and on this front the story doesn't give us anything we haven't seen before in, for instance, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. One of the central characters is a Catholic physicist, which proves a bit more interesting: he has a crisis of faith after viewing some bloody scenes from the Crusades over the WormCam. He seeks to get past this impasse by joining the "12,000 Days" project, which seeks to fully chronicle every day in the life of Jesus Christ. Clarke and Baxter devote an entire chapter (albeit a fairly brief one) to presenting their world's true account of the life of Jesus, which the Afterword states is based largely on A.N. Wilson's biography Jesus: A Life. There's nothing terribly shocking here-- the Christmas story is an invention (as, interestingly, was the entire life of Moses); he was more a mason than a carpenter; there were 14 disciples, not 12; there were miracle cures, but all of the illnesses so cured seemed to be hysteric in nature. Things get really interesting, though, when we get to the Crucifixion:

The moment of His death is oddly obscured; WormCam exploration there is limited. Some scientists have speculated that there is such a density of viewpoints in those key seconds that the fabric of spacetime itself is being damaged by wormhole intrusions. And these viewpoints are presumably sent down by observers from our own future-- or perhaps fro a multiplicity of possible futures, if what lies ahead of us is undetermined... Even now, despite all our technology, we see Him through a glass darkly.

Ah, now there's an interesting SFnal take on the death of Jesus! Even in this strictly materialistic novel, the death of Jesus is a special event-- who knows what might be the result of a near-infinite number of microscopic wormholes piercing the fabric of spacetime at the same moment and place? It's a question Clarke and Baxter don't explore further, but I'm not sure they need to. Ambiguity is the point here, after all...

Lastly, there's a brief mention of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere at the end of the novel. The "apotheosis" at the end of the aforementioned Childhood's End bears a great similarity to Teilhard de Chardin's conception of the Omega Point, an eschatological moment in the future when the human race becomes a single mental entity. Here, nearly 50 years later, Clarke seems to acknowledges that similarity directly, and hopefully sends a few readers in search of The Phenomenon of Man...

April 29, 2010

The New York Times reports that new selections from Philip K. Dick's 8,000-page theological journal known as the Exegesis are to be published next year. At least two volumes are projected (it's unclear as of yet whether or not they're planning to print the journals in their entirety), to be edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson (who published an article on Ubik a few years ago that I have not yet read). Previous selections were published in a volume edited by Dick's chief biographer, Lawrence Sutin, entitled In Pursuit of Valis. Lethem rightly notes that it's a bit of an exaggeration to refer to the Exegesis as a "work," which implies concepts of completeness and boundaries that just don't apply to a sprawling archive of notes. Nevertheless, it was in these journals that Dick laid the theological groundwork for his final novels. In Pink Beams of Light from the God in the GutterI argue that Dick's mystical speculations mark him as an important 20th century theologian, and I am excited to see what new speculations these new volumes will reveal.

Most people who debate science vs. religion tend to ask the same boring question. Does God exist?Yawn. However, the question in all of these stories is never “Do these
beings really exist?” The question is “What do we call them?” It’s
never “Does this force actually exist?” It’s, “What do we call it?” Or
“How do we treat it?” Or “How do we interact with it?” One of the many
things that fascinates me about these stories is that the thing,
whatever it is—a being, a force—always exists. Some choose to
acknowledge it via gratitude, giving it a place of honor, organizing
their lives around it and allowing it to feed them spiritually. Others
simply use it as a thing, a tool, taking from it what they will when
they will then calling it a day. But neither reaction negates the
existence of the thing.

I like the treatment of "Does God exist?" as a dull and tired debate. The first thing that question brings to my mind is "How are you defining 'God'?" Chances are the questioner is rolling up more than a few assumptions with that word. Even the most atheistic of scientists (and, yes, I'm thinking specifically of Richard Dawkins) can start to sound downright mystical when they start talking about the vastness of the universe or the philosophical concept of a "scientific law." So, yes, I think Jusino is right to argue that "what we call it" and "how we treat it" are more interesting ways to approach the interplay of science and religion than tired old atheist-versus-creationist fight.

Joe Laycock reviews Daybreakers for Religion Dispatches, finding Eucharistic themes amidst the blood-soaked chaos. I haven't seen the movie, but its vampire society is an intriguing premise (however much it may crib from the end of I Am Legend). And for the Marty Martin Center, Mr. Laycock has also penned a brief discussion of Avatarthat draws a parallel between the planet-ravaging, sinful humans of that film with the planet-ravaging, sinful humans of C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels. I recently read Joe's excellent exploration of real life vampires, Vampires Today, which is an intriguing and extraordinarily well-written look at a subculture with some unexpectedly religious elements. And you can read it too.

For the Guardian, Toby Lichtig takes a quick look at secular apocalypticism. He points out an interesting contrast between environmental nightmares and Cold War nuclear scenarios:

Put simply, the difference between the current threat and older ones is this: we are all, personally, to blame. Almost everyone (especially in the well-read west) is doing their bit
to make the world a warmer place, and thus we are all implicated in the
calamity that will this time surely spell the End.

This pushes secular apocalypse back into religious territory. Nuclear war can't be framed as punishment for individual sin, but environmental collapse can. Of course, it's not just climate-change nightmares that can be framed this way: as I pointed out in my review of Cloverfield, some giant monster attacks may be caused by your inconsiderate cell phone use.

Scott Timberg has written a six-part series on Philip K. Dick's Orange County years for the Los Angeles Times, which is particularly interesting because it was in those years that Dick had his vivid religious experiences. Timberg tackles that topic in part four, treating it generally as a "mystery" that can never be solved, and giving a bit too much credence to Thomas Disch, who I believe was sorely mistaken about the nature of Dick's religious thought. It would have been nice to have a paragraph or two about the actual content of Dick's theological writing-- but I guess asking for theology in the LA Times might be a fool's errand.

February 08, 2010

An easy-enough meme from SF Signal-- answer the following four questions:

What Book Are You Reading Now?

Why did you choose it?

What's the best thing about it?

What's the worst thing about it?

1. Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg. I'm about halfway through.*

2. I realized, after picking two of his stories for my list of The 10 Best Science Fiction Stories About Religion and reviewing Downward to the Earth, that Silverberg really is one of my favorite authors (with a bullet). I'm not sure where I first heard of Tower of Glass-- I think it may have been in Donald Palumbo's brief but excellent survey of religious ideas in SF (and dang if I can't find the title or citation at the moment, but I have a copy of it somewhere). After my recent catch-up run on the last few months of SF magazines and the epic Under the Dome, I wanted something that was a) a novel rather than short stories, b) a short novel rather than a long one, and c) old-ish rather than new. Tower of Glass fit the bill, and is a fairly-acclaimed work by an author who I've been getting very into, so here we are.

3. It's got a wonderful android religion that takes form through some nicely poetic scriptural passages and a theological debate or two. The androids worship their inventor, Krug, but it's not so theologically-simple as that formulation implies: they're aware that Krug is just a guy, and what they worship is not so much Krug the man as the principle of creation that his individual person implies. I may write more about it soon.

4. The plot seems a bit stretched, like this was conceived as a novella and then extended to longer form. But Silverberg does the extending quite well, I think.

*The meme assumes you're reading only one book, which I never am-- though I usually keep myself to one work of fiction at a time. On the nonfiction shelf: Bishops at Large by Peter Anson, the supplemental material from the two-volume Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths, and England's Dreaming by Jon Savage. I'm also gradually working through Mike Ashley's history of SF magazines and the complete stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

February 02, 2010

I was a big fan of Stephen King growing up, but it's been quite a few years since I've read anything of his. When I heard that his latest novel was a thousand-plus-page science fictional epic, I knew I was going to have to give it a try. Under the Dome describes, in minute detail, what happens when the small Maine town (what else?) of Chester's Mill is cut off from the world by an invisible, impenetrable barrier. The result is, without spoiling too much, a rapid descent into fascism, an exploration of the town's dark, Twin Peaks-ish underbelly, and an unhappy ending for just about everybody.

I was a bit disappointed in the book for a few reasons. It was certainly a page-turner, but I did feel it was a bit too long, and could easily have been wrapped up two or three hundred pages earlier. One part of the problem is the incredibly short time-frame the story covers: the entire novel describes a single week, beginning pretty much the moment the Dome appears. The pacing of the novel is compelling, but I would have much rather learned what life was like in Chester's Mill five weeks, three months, or six years later; wrapping things up in seven days robs us of much of the extrapolative possibility inherent in the story's central concept. Furthermore, King has already done the basic story of Under the Dome-- bizarre event isolates the inhabitants of a small Maine town; fascism rapidly emerges-- in "The Mist." At one point a character makes an offhand comment about "that movie, The Mist," and once you get past the initial chuckle it feels like King's tacit acknowledgment: Yeah, I've done this before, but look! this is ten times longer! None of these problems kept me from finishing the book, but I do wish it had been a bit more... something.

Religion crops up in several places in the story. We see it first in the town's two ministers. First is the fundamentalist Lester Coggins, a conservative convinced that the town is being punished for its sins (in which he has a large share). Second is the Congregationalist Piper Libby, who isn't too sure she believes in God anymore: "Not-There was her private name for God lately. Earlier in the fall it had been The Great Maybe. During the summer, it had been The Omnipotent Could-Be." Such is our introduction to Libby; she's saved from the cliché of the preacher-who-has-lost-her-faith by a depth of character that emerges much later in the book.

But the real meat of the book's religious, and apocalyptic, content comes from two non-ordained characters. "Big Jim" Rennie is a used car dealer and local despot who attempts, with a disturbing level of success, to position himself as the town's absolute ruler as soon as the Dome descends. Rennie is Lester Coggins' chief congregant, and his spirituality is presented as the lowest common denominator of evangelicalism: his image of the afterlife is to spend eternity eating steak and mashed potatoes with Jesus. (We get a glimpse of his actual afterlife at the book's end, in a moment with a nice Twilight Zone flavor). This bland religiosity covers up a much more sinister contempt for everyone and everything. He sees the Dome not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity to take complete control of the town. Anyone who thinks King is sentimental about small-town Maine should take a close look at this character, who makes it pretty clear that he sees dark and evil things barely even concealed beneath the veneer of rural gentility.

[There are some spoilers in the paragraph below.]

A bit more interesting is Phil Bushey, a speed freak now known as "Chef" due to the incredible size and efficiency of his meth lab-- a meth lab created and owned by Rennie and Coggins. Chef dropped completely off the town's radar months before the Dome, and has become transformed by a combined drug paranoia and religious mania into a volatile and extremely dangerous force. After an extended drug binge in the meth lab-- a shack behind Coggins' church-- he has developed an elaborate end-times theology in which he, anointed by God and high-quality drugs, is a God's frontline soldier in the war against "bitter men" like Rennie. His violent millenialism turns the small apocalypse of the Dome into a big apocalypse when the meth lab ultimately explodes, taking the rest of the town with it. And, by the book's end, after seeing the depths to which a "normal" town can stoop in so short a time, we're not so sure that Chester's Mill doesn't deserve it.

[Here endeth the spoilers.]

Ultimately, Under the Dome doesn't quite justify its page count. Though the plot moves quickly and the enormous cast is well-drawn, it doesn't push its SF ideas quite far enough. When we learn the mystery of the Dome at the book's end, it feels suspiciously like the conclusion of a carefully-constructed shaggy dog story. King isn't primarily an SF writer, of course, and some might even question identifying this novel as SF at all. But as someone who came to this book because of its genre leanings, I felt it would have been well-served by devoting a bit more of its energy to idea-exploration. Add to that a fairly disturbing sexualization of violence toward women in the book's first half (something I'm surprised more reviewers haven't mentioned), and you have a book that simply isn't rewarding enough for what it asks of its readers. It's a mostly enjoyable book, sure; but 1,100 pages calls for a big investment of time and attention, and we need more than this book gives us to make that investment worthwhile.

January 11, 2010

Self-identified Fundamentalist David Cloud has written a short piece on why you should "Beware of Science Fiction." (The reasons mostly boil down to "because it will make you a polyamorous nudist atheist who believes in evolution.") He singles out Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Roddenberry as the worst offenders-- and the expiration date on those examples goes a long way toward showing how much Cloud actually knows about SF.

The piece reminded me quite a bit of James A. Herrick's slightly more subtle but no less damning critique of SF, Scientific Mythologies. In my review of Herrick's book for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, I called the author out for treating Christianity as monolothic, unchanging, and "traditional," while ignoring or dismissing Christianity's rich "tradition" of speculative theology. Cloud is clearly committing the same error here.

And, of course, my own The Gospel According to Science Fiction is a sort of counterargument in itself. On a certain live, Herrick and Cloud are right that much (though not
all) SF may be in opposition to a particular kind of Christianity,
but the world of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is much bigger than that. And even self-identified atheists and agnostics have written some of the most profound theological SF of all time. SF is a
wonderful place for speculative theology and religious exploration,
which I believe are very valuable and powerful things.

December 28, 2009

It's the end of the year-- and that means it's time to share my votes in the annual Asimov's readers poll and Analog's Anlab. Links are to my reviews where applicable; excerpts from many of the stories are available on Asimov's and Analog's respective websites.

Kristine
Kathryn Rusch has had a busy year, it seems, writing one amazing
novella after another for both Asimov's and Analog and quickly becoming
a one of my favorite authors. Many of her stories tackle complex
ethical issues-- for instance, "Broken Windchimes," in which aliens
raise choirs of boy sopranos to be their musical slaves. Others, like
"The Spires of Denon," ponder the ineffability of truly alien cultures
by exploring bizarre artifacts. If she's written a bad story, I haven't
read it. Nancy Kress is no slouch either, and this story about genetic
engineering and the idea of "perfection" is a similarly-admirable
ethical puzzle wrapped up in a corporate-espionage thriller.

I
loved Broderick's story of a group of second-generation mutant geniuses
and Kosmatka and Poore's zoo-based exploration of forgiveness, trust,
and mutant wasps. But Gunn and Swanwick's dark, dark, DARK fantasy,
about some interdimensional "elves" that are as evil as you can imagine
and then some, was a truly memorable reading experience. Honorable
mention to "Sails the Morne" by Chris Willrich (June), about aliens who
want to eat the Book of Kells, and "Soulmates" by Mike Resnick and
Lezli Robyn (September), about a man who befriends a
recently-self-aware robot.

Reed's
story takes an archeologist's view of the birth of tradition in a dying
alien culture. Cassutt's story of the last man to set foot on the moon
(in the near future of an alternate universe) both lionizes and
eulogizes the Apollo program. But Kowal's tale of love and cloning,
which hits some pretty strong emotional chords, takes the prize.
Honorable mention: "Five Thousand Miles From Birdland" by Robert R. Chase
(January); "The Day Before the Day Before" by Steve Rasnic Tem
(September).

Poem

1. The Silence of Rockets by G.O. Clark (February)2. Edgar Allan Poe by Bryan D. Dietrich (October/November)3. For Sale: One Moon-Base, Never Used by Esther M. Friesner (July)

The
title of Friesner's poem alone is powerful; and Dietrich's humorous
meditation on the world's mopiest action figure is bemused fun. But
Clark's poem, which contrasts the otherworldly aspirations of space
travel and the hope of life after death, is one of the few I've read in
Asimov's that's really spoken to me: "...the sky once again become / a
dusty concave shell, a / container of cast out prayers..."

Cover

1. April/May by Paul Youll, illustrating "The Spires of Denon" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch2. August by John Jude Palencar, originally created for The Drawing of the Three by Steven King3. October/November by Dominic Harman

And there should be a special award for Norman Spinrad's essay
"What Killed Tom Disch?", which was sort of a review of Disch's final
novel, The Word of God, but was also much, much more. You can, and
should, read it online.

Flynn's tall tale about a quest for life a bit nearer the planet's core
is a fun romp (told in part by a tipsy priest). It was a tough fight
for the top two slots: I really loved Castro's Western-ish tale of a
frontiersman on the moon who can't live up to his very Earpian legend.
The evolving morality of Rusch's eponymous Recovery Man reminded me of
Martin Buber, which is never a bad thing.

Ligon's
sequel to last year's "El Dorado" made an at-first simplistic alien
religion much more complex, which is only one reason why it's a good
story. Burns' exploration of robot rights hit a couple liberation
theology notes. And Turtledove's clever alternate history, in which
Galileo's inquisitor was Cardinal Sigmund Freud, brought fictional
light to an intriguing true story. Honorable mention to "Among the
Tchi" by Adam-Troy Castro (May)-- about a nightmarish writers' group
run by overcritical aliens, "Quickfeathers" by Alexis Glynn Latner
(May), which explores the mythology of a birdlike alien race, and
"Shallow Copy" by Jesse L. Watson (October), in which two kids
accidentally create a virtual being.

Short story

1. Solaceby James van Pelt (June)2. The Invasion by H.G. Stratmann (April)3. After the First Death by Jerry Craven (March)

James
van Pelt's "Solace" packs a lot into nine pages, creating an emotional
link between two characters centuries apart using a candlestick and a
passage of scripture.

I don't have much to say about Analog's fact pieces this year, alas. I tend to prefer reading the morephilosophical ones, and this year tended to the nuts and bolts.

Cover

1. March by Jean-Pierre Normand2. January/February by John Allemand, illustrating "Doctor Alien" by Rajnar Vajra
3. September by Alperium/Shutterstock.com

There
have been more than a few computer-generated covers for the SF
magazines in the past few years that I've hated, so it's nice to see
one done right, as on the September issue. I love the weird aliens John
Allemand creates for his interior illustrations, and I'm always happy
to see his work on the cover. But the one that spoke to me the most was
Normand's image of enormous floating structures in a retrofuturistic
cityscape: it's like Frank R. Paul never left us.

December 13, 2009

The SF magazines are piling up next to my desk... has it really been
four months since I last reviewed them? Let's get caught up, then:

Robert Reed's "Before My Last Breath" in the October/November 2009
issue of Asimov's looks at the origins of a tradition. In this story, a
coal-mining operation discovers evidence of an ancient alien
civilization, and a team of archeologists comes to some intriguing
conclusions about the aliens' history. They crash-landed millennia ago,
the humans theorize, and expected to be rescued. As years passed, they
suspected that their rescuers were delayed, and some of them buried
themselves in a peat bog to hibernate until they arrived. But help
never came, and over generations the aliens forgot the reasons behind
the bog hibernations. As their bodies, technology, and culture
devolved, the once-pragmatic undertaking became a simple burial custom.
The metal ring the first aliens brought into their hibernation was a
depiction of their spaceship, but later generations simply held a
simplified circle of metal, a symbol of something forgotten: "Nobody
remembered what the starship looked like. Or maybe they forgot about
the ship entirely, and the ring's purpose changed. It was a symbol, an
offering, something that would allow their god to catch their soul and
take them back to Heaven again." Religion as cultural entropy: a bleak
theory befitting the somewhat sorrowful tone of the story. Reed's
stories are always intriguing, and this one is no exception.

Also well worth reading in this issue is Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore's "The Blood Dauber," a story about a zookeeper who finds himself caring for a rather unusual wasp... or something. To say it's a story about the futility of revenge doesn't do it justice. I wouldn't be surprised to see this turn up in some year's-best lists; it will very likely be one of my Reader's Poll choices for this year (which I really ought to start thinking about, huh?).

The November issue of Analog includes "Joan," a fun but not wholly
satisfying story by John G. Hemry. The main character is a time
traveler who is obsessed with Joan of Arc, and travels to 15th-Century
France to meet her-- and to sort-of accidentally save her from
execution. Kate, the time-traveler, has a hard time understanding
Joan's faith; when Joan describes one of her visions Kate worries that
this proves her to be "the kind of hysteric that history had often
painted her as." Kate has an idea of Joan as a proto-feminist icon who
wouldn't believe that kind of "mindless superstition." This doesn't sit
right with me because I can't really imagine someone being as obsessed
with Joan as Kate is without wholly accepting the
importance of Joan's visions to her story. Kate's obsession, it seems, is built on a very basic misunderstanding and tremendous blind spot; the only way you can avoid accounting for Joan's religion is to willfully ignore it. Joan
wins Kate over a bit by the end, but her need to be won over strikes me
as odd.

The November and December Analog carry a two-part serial by G.
David Nordley called To Climb a Flat Mountain that has some sectarian
strife in its backstory. The characters in this tale are a war party
flying from Earth to liberate a colony world that has been overrun by
"New Reformationists"-- reactionary religious zealots who have
reinstated quaint old customs like slavery and gladiatorial combat.
Some of those in the war party are "real Christians," or "Old
Reformationists"-- as one character notes, "nobody was more ready to go
after this New Reformation fringe group than the Old Reformation." But
the warship is sabotaged, and they overshoot their target by a few
hundred light-years, landing on a cube-shaped artificial world with some
strange geological properties (as the title suggests). Some of the
castaways are susceptible to the same kind of conservative pitfalls as
the zealots they set out to conquer, and before long the survivors have
split into two groups: the close-minded religious one and the heroic,
go-getting secular one. This somewhat simplistic division falls pretty
quickly into the background, though, as Nordley is more interested in
exploring this strange six-sided world and its alien inhabitants than
the human conflicts that got us there.

The DecemberAnalog also includes "The Universe Beneath Our Feet" by
Carl Frederick, a story told from the point of view of a rebellious
pair of crablike aliens who live in an underwater theocracy. K'Chir and
Jerik doubt the existence of their society's God-- a benevolent being
who rains "sweet manna" down upon the ocean floor. Instead, K'Chir
posits that the "manna" is the decomposing remains of other ocean
creatures. To prove it, he sets out to climb the enormous wall of ice
on the outskirts of their community, hoping to reach the top and find
no God there. Frederick's description of the aliens' bodies is
inventive, so it's a shame that the religion and culture he has created for them is
so unoriginal-- and human. There's a stern high priest, a strict
code of discipline, a benevolent God-in-the-sky-- and absolutely
nothing to suggest that this religion originated anywhere other than in
the mind of a human being with a great distaste for things religious. I
previously criticized Frederick for his simplistic understanding of God
in his fact article "The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe," and the
same problems are apparent here-- he has a very narrow understanding of
what religion is, and can be. Here, it's hampered an
otherwise-enjoyable piece of fiction.

The same can't be said of H. G. Stratmann, whose series of stories
about Russian Orthodox astronaut Katerina Savitskaya continues in the
December Analog with "Wilderness Were Paradise Enow." In this
installment, mysterious aliens have given Katerina and her fellow
astronaut Martin Slayton godlike powers. Katerina rejects them, since
they aren't also accompanied by godlike wisdom. Martin, on the other
hand, sets out to solve all of humanity's problems. Healing the lame
and diverting the courses of tornadoes works fairly well, but when he
tries to stop human-on-human violence he runs smack into the problem of
free will, with disastrous results. Katerina holds up the Crucifixion
as an example of why it's important to choose good rather than being
forced to behave. Her stance is a Christian humanist one:

Whatever measure of paradise we create on Earth, Mars, or other worlds
will be one we earned-- not something given as a 'gift.' If we make
life better it'll be because we used science to make Nature less
dangerous and relieve human suffering. If we choose to be kind and care
about others, we can claim credit for doing it. He showed us what we
could do with our own human abilities. It's up to us to freely accept
His challenge and imitate Him.

The January/FebruaryAnalog continues their story in "Thus Spake the
Aliens," which ponders the moral and theological goals of the
mysterious extraterrestrials, and bringing Katerina's adventures to an
apparent conclusion. Put together, these stories must be approaching
the length of a novel by now...

Also in the January/February Analog is "Neptune's Treasure," a new
entry in Richard A. Lovett's series of stories about deep-space miner
Floyd and his precocious AI companion Brittney. This story continues to
explore the nature of selfhood, primarily through Brittney's internal
monolog.

More whimsical is Eric James Stone's "Rejiggering the Thingamajig, a
story about a hyper-evolved, Buddhist Tyrannosaurus and a
trigger-happy, artificially-intelligent gun on a quest for decent tech
support. The T. Rex tries to teach the gun about her faith, with
limited success-- after overzealously firing on some dangerous woodland
creatures, it claims "I was only tryin'a help 'em move on to their next
rebirth."

Then there's "Simple Gifts" by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, the story of
human colonists on a mineral-rich planet inhabited by Ewok-like
"furries." The humans want the planet's resources, but they're paranoid
about offending the furries' "primitive" religious sensibilities--
worries that may be based on anthropocentric assumptions about what the
aliens actually believe. It's a clever story, and a nice antidote to
the anthropocentrically-depicted religion of stories like "The Universe
Beneath our Feet."

Lastly, there's another of Kristine Kathryn Rusch's always-enjoyable Retrieval Artist stories, "The Possession of Paavo Deshin," which ponders the complicated ethics of a case of adoption, kidnapping, and cybernetic implants.

The JanuaryAsimov's opens with "Marya and the Pirate" by Geoffrey A.
Landis, a great story that reminded me in some ways of Tom Godwin's
classic "The Cold Equations." Landis tells the story of an honorable
pirate's attempt to hijack a mine built on the back of a comet. Thre's
only one person on the mining station, and the pirate doesn't wish her
harm-- but the universe may have other ideas. The issue of religion
comes up briefly when the young girl sees him offer a prayer to a
statue of the Buddha. She's skeptical about whether the pirate actually
"believe[s] in that stuff," and he responds:

No, not exactly. The rituals instill a certain amount of discipline
that I like to encourage my people to follow, and I observe the forms,
so as to not give them any temptation to slack off. But if you mean, do
I believe a three-thousand-year-old dead Indian guy is watching over us
from the great beyond, I'll reserve judgment on that until I see him.

That's hardly the focus of the story, however, and the battle of wits
between the young miner and the pirate makes for a great story.

Also in this issue is Chris Roberson's short "Wonder House," a story
about a pulp publisher set in the 1930s of an alternate universe in
which the Aztec and Mandarin empires are the dominant world powers. The
focus of this story is on the similarities between the role of Jews--
or, more accurately, Jewish pop culture-- in this fictional world and
our own. At the story's conclusion, two young pulp fiction devotees
make a pitch to the publisher to create a new character for a new
medium, one that combines words and colorful pictures. Their creation
is a hero, rooted in Jewish folklore, who will help the helpless and
fight for the oppressed while wearing a colorful costume bearing the
Hebrew letter Shin, for "Shaddai." I've been thinking a lot lately
about the religious origins of Superman (for reasons I hope to be
announcing soon), so this story was of particular interest. One
nitpicker's note, though: the kids who make the pitch are Segal and
Kurtzberg-- that is, Jerry Siegel and Jack Kirby-- which seems a bit
unfair to Joe Shuster. Isn't Kirby's real-world list of creations long
and impressive enough without also making him the fictional creator of
Superman?

That's it for now-- though the February Asimov's just arrived, so I'm not really caught up.